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from the intelligent-content-might-be-significantly-lower dept.
Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
Italians are some of the fastest speakers on the planet, chattering at up to nine syllables per second. Many Germans, on the other hand, are slow enunciators, delivering five to six syllables in the same amount of time. Yet in any given minute, Italians and Germans convey roughly the same amount of information, according to a new study. Indeed, no matter how fast or slowly languages are spoken, they tend to transmit information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code.
"This is pretty solid stuff," says Bart de Boer, an evolutionary linguist who studies speech production at the Free University of Brussels, but was not involved in the work. Language lovers have long suspected that information-heavy languages—those that pack more information about tense, gender, and speaker into smaller units, for example—move slowly to make up for their density of information, he says, whereas information-light languages such as Italian can gallop along at a much faster pace. But until now, no one had the data to prove it.
Scientists started with written texts from 17 languages, including English, Italian, Japanese, and Vietnamese. They calculated the information density of each language in bits—the same unit that describes how quickly your cellphone, laptop, or computer modem transmits information. They found that Japanese, which has only 643 syllables, had an information density of about 5 bits per syllable, whereas English, with its 6949 syllables, had a density of just over 7 bits per syllable. Vietnamese, with its complex system of six tones (each of which can further differentiate a syllable), topped the charts at 8 bits per syllable.
From the Abstract:
"Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-linguistic variation being the norm. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of syllables they allow, resulting in large variation in the Shannon information per syllable. Nevertheless, all natural languages allow their speakers to efficiently encode and transmit information. We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages' structural properties and their speakers' neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture."
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 06 2019, @04:19PM (9 children)
Back in the decades immediately following the invention of movies and TV, there was a widely accepted maxim that, in the US, Northerners spoke much more quickly than Southerners. This persisted as late as the 1970s, but mostly among the older generation who did not grow up glued to the broadcast networks.
Since the world has unified with instant communication and near-universal distribution of audio-visual media, it's not surprising that we're losing our accents and other local variations in communication, including socially normal data rates.
Watch some old Bogart movies and tell me what the data rate is when Lauren Bacall talks to Bogey... If I recall correctly, it depends quite a bit on the character she's playing.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @04:32PM (8 children)
I can understand British English, New York English, Southern English, and West Coast English (me)... but I couldn't understand a single word from a back woods hillbilly from somewhere near the Ozarks. It wasn't a French accent like New Orleans, wasn't Southern drawl like Georgia, it was English like I've never heard.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 06 2019, @04:49PM
Florida Crackers have their own dialect as well - it's English, but not like any you've heard elsewhere.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 06 2019, @05:08PM (5 children)
I have rarely had a few similar experiences in my life. Someone speaking English. But certain words / phrases were impossible to parse.
One example (while working pumping gas during college decades ago, this thing called 'full service').
What I think I heard: "do you have any candy smaps?"
What was intended: "do you have any kansas maps?"
(but I preferred questions like: how much is your 39 cent ice cream? Or what time is the 3 O'clock parade?)
In Judges 12:5-6 [biblegateway.com] is an example of how a difference in dialect could get you killed.
Amusingly the Hebrew letter ש can be pronounced with the "s" or "sh" sound. But modern markings in text indicate which pronunciation is intended so that you don't lose your life.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @05:58PM
Take your fork handle and stuff 'em.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday September 06 2019, @06:58PM (3 children)
When I was in HS, working at a grocery store in a small town in Vermont, I was facing shelves one day when a guy came up to me and we had this conversation:
Guy: "Do you have any ass?"
Me: "WHAT!!!???"
Guy: "Ass, do you have any ass?"
Me: [totally shocked look on my face]
Guy: "Ass -- you know, you put it in a cooler, put beer in it, makes it cold."
Me: "Oh -- ICE -- you want ice -- that's over there."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @07:51PM (2 children)
Girl to cashier: Can I have a poke?
Cashier: ?
Girl to cashier: A bag.
A poke is slang for a bag.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday September 06 2019, @11:36PM
Vietnemese electrical engineers discussing Scottky diodes in English:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @05:56AM
Not slang, just archaic.
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/poke_bag [lexico.com]
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Friday September 06 2019, @08:53PM
Oblig You like to see homos naked? [youtube.com]
And the Ozark hillbillies ain't got nothing on the Scottish [youtube.com].
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.